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208 HOMES & ART AUTUMN 2012
In focus
Peter Ken dall | Brush with fame
always get inspired to paint someone else,”
he says, with the look of a man defeated.
“Now I just accept that portraiture will
always be there.”
Raised in Melbourne, Peter honed
his drawing skills from an early age. “I
was fascinated by people,” he says. “At
school, I used to get in trouble for drawing
caricatures of my teachers.”
He announced he was an artist at the
age of eight, and by 14 was sketching his
first nude models. “I was ethical about it
too,” he laughs.
As a student at the National Gallery
School and Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology, Peter initially survived on raw
talent. “I’d t urn up whenever I felt like it,”
he says. “But then one day I saw the other
students doing really interesting drawings,
and I realised I’d missed something. That’s
when I set out to learn.”
For Peter, great art is about more than
technique. “You can get all the details
right, but it needs to have life in it,” he
says. “That’s what makes a work stand out.
I endow life into everything I do.”
Along with portraiture, Peter is a
renowned abstract painter and award-
winning children’s book illustrator. He has
completed artist residencies in Australia
and overseas – including a stint at the
ABC studios in East Perth – and even had
a regular TV segment for a while. “That’s
how you survive as an artist,” he says.
“When the phone rings, you don’t say ‘no’.”
It was lucky Peter said yes in 2004,
when one client called with a proposal.
“He asked if I wanted to paint Peter Brock
for the Archibald,” he recalls. “I wasn’t
really into cars, so I didn’t know that
much about him.”
That painting turned out to be Peter’s
first finalist in the competition – and sold
to a private collector for $100,000. It was
also the start of a friendship with Peter
Brock, prior to his death in a car accident
in 2006. “Peter and I clicked straight
away,” says the artist, who sketched him
over several sittings. “I always chat to my
subjects, but Peter was very interesting. He
talked a lot about spiritual things.”
Something of that came through in
the portrait. When Peter Brock saw it on
display at the Archibald exhibition, he was
moved to tears. “I could hardly look at it,”
the racing identity told The Age newspaper
at the time. “It was as if I had no secrets.
All my idiosyncrasies, my vulnerability,
were on show.”
The artist says this reaction was a
turning point. “At that moment, I knew I
was the real deal as an artist. Up until then,
some part of me wasn’t sure.”
“People were buying paintings
off the invitation, without even
seeing the originals”